Cricket Australia has responded within hours after losing their appeal to the ICC disputes committee (see my earlier posting today).

Emirates, the UAE-based airline best known in Australia for sponsoring Collingwood Football Club, will be the official team sponsor for the Australian team for the world cup in the Caribbean in March and April. Emirates, of course, is also the naming rights sponsor of the ICC Elite Umpire Panel and is the "official airline" of the Dubai-based ICC.

Travelex (Thomas Cook in a past life) has been the naming rights sponsor for Australian touring teams overseas since 2001, even to the point of the "Ashes Tour" officially becoming the "Travelex Tour of the UK and Ireland".

But with less than five weeks till the start of the one-day world championships in the Caribbean, Cricket Australia's arrangements with Travelex have been blocked under ICC ambush marketing rules, and confirmed yesterday by its Disputes Resolution Committee.

NASA astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak is being held without bail after police say she attacked her rival for another astronaut's attention at Orlando International Airport Monday.

Nowak, who did a mission on the Space Shuttle last year, drove more than 12 hours from Texas to meet the 1 a.m. flight of a younger woman who had also been seeing the astronaut she was pining for, according to Orlando police.

Exhibit A: www.indystar.com

Exhibit B: www.chicagotribune.com

There can be few more disturbing documents released in quite a long time than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's latest assessment report, published on Thursday.

The PDF of the 21-page "Summary for Policymakers" can be downloaded from here. There is more background on the IPCC website, but let me reproduce, in full, the press release issued by the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) on Thursday:

Seven Saturdays from today, March 24, is the NSW State Election. It's a rather depressing occasion this time around. On one side, a Labor government whose record is so bad in some areas that it deserves, not to be thrown out of office, but to be hurled out of the highest window. On the other hand, a Liberal/Nationals opposition led by one of the most disturbing excuses for a party leader that I have ever seen.

Fall Creek Baptist Church in Indianapolis have cancelled their plans to host a Super Bowl party on Sunday, to watch their Colts lose to the Bears, after the National Football League sent them a "cease and desist" letter.

You see, Fall Creek church, and thousands of other churches in the US, are infringing NFL trademarks and offering unauthorised public screenings of Super Bowl XLI without the poor impoverished League receiving a single cent in return.

All Italian football is in limbo after the death of a policeman during a riot at Friday night's Catania v Palermo game.

For a league still recovering from the match-fixing traumas of recent uears, this level of crowd violence sinks its reputation even further.

I have linked to a report from The Guardian. I dare say we'll hear more over the weekend.

La Gazzetta's website has more, in Italian of course.

John Howard, the self-styled "cricket tragic" who takes seems blissfully unaware of either one-day cricket or Twenty20, made a cameo appearance at Maroubra Beach this morning to toss the bat prior to the Australia v England Beach Cricket international. England won.

Of course he does. What's the problem?

Outreach Media, a subsidiary of the non-denominational FEVA Ministries, produces a monthly series of colourful signs with attention-grabbing Christian messages, which it syndicates to churches around the country (mostly in Sydney, though I saw one in Newcastle recently).

Some examples of their handiwork, including a very clever Telstra parody, can be seen on their website. Last month, the theme, timed to coincide with the Ashes, was "Would you worship Jesus if he scored 10,000 Test runs?"